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December 2006

Sunday, 31 December 2006

Stumbled from D.C. to Philadelphia to Houston today. Haven't had an internet connection since Thursday morning. Physically incapable of responding to 280 emails tonight. Will write about the first blogger gathering, the second blogger gathering, the panel, and UnfoggeDCon from California, after many, many hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Last year, I handled the duties myself. But it’s difficult to prepare a talk and network and keep you informed, but I’ll try my best. Updates, as soon as they’re available, can be found here.
Included among them will be the finalized plans for the big meet-up
this Thursday. Ideas are still circulating, but we should have it all
hammered out early tomorrow.

On another note, John doesn’t believe the following claims made by Jeffrey Williams and William Spanos in the forthcoming the minnesota review. I don’t either, but for different reasons. Here’s an excerpt from my talk:

Later in [his interview with Toril Moi], he notes that
his students “might have read [Judith] Butler, but have no idea who
Paul de Man is.” In another interview, William Spanos observes that his
“students haven’t the foggiest idea the history of literary criticism
prior to the contemporary moment. Not simply the hegemony of New
Criticism, but also the emergent struggle of the early postructuralists
to revolutionize that earlier tradition. They don’t know who Cleanth
Brooks is, they haven’t read Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans or Twain’s Pudd’enhead Wilson or Faulkner’s ‘The Bear.’"

I find it difficult to believe that graduate students in English have
never heard of Cleanth Brooks and Paul de Man—then again, I did my
undergraduate work at LSU, in rooms down the hall from the office of The Southern Review,
and am doing my graduate work at UCI, in a building shared with Andrzej
Warminski. To not have heard of Brooks or de Man would’ve required a
concerted effort, one whose intensity implies that I had, in fact,
heard of them and simply wanted no more of it.

Are there really graduate students who haven’t heard of Brooks or de Man, or are Williams and Spanos merely lamenting a decline in familiarity with The Well-Wrought Urn and Blindness and Insight? But isn’t that even a little hyperbolic? Or are my LSU/UCI-tinted glasses coloring my expectations?

Monday, 25 December 2006

(For the next week, I'll be rerunning my most substantial posts.
Feel free to comment on them again, as I haven't had time to revise
them and whatever problems you had with them the first go-round remain.)

Wednesday, 20 December 2006

Outside the second-floor bedroom of a small suburban mansion, dark clouds conspire in thunder. Rivers will swell, cattle drown, claps one. Gaudy Christmas sweaters will be drenched, another crashes. Unaware of the cumulonimbus cabal overhead, Scott slips into an overlarge black leather chair and prepares to study. The welt of its exaggerated box cushion wrinkles under his weight, revealing the richer shade of black the chair had been before the morning sun (which would have crawled the through east-facing window by now, were it not obscured by the chattering thunderheads) bleached its treated hide.

So Scott reads, his left heel tapping the chair's tapered maple leg, his right elbow relaxing on its thick scrolled arm. His head lolls, resting briefly on the descending crest of its thick, upholstered back. In his left hand, he holds a copy of Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire, open to a chapter entitled "Manifest Domesticity." It begins with a description of

a white pioneer family in a small clearing surrounded by a dense, towering forest. The mother stands at the center of the picture, with her husband at her side holding his rifle, and her children at her feet, staring at a freshly killed deer. An open cooking fire, a crude log cabin, and a few stalks of corn complete the scene. (23)

Kaplan's approach to academic writing appeals to Scott, who smiles at how cleverly she employed ekphrasis to set the scene of her argument. The critic of novels should be familiar enough—be it intuitively or theoretically—with the techniques of the novelist to use them as Kaplan has here. Why not draw your readers in, he asks himself, with the one thing you can be certain appeals to them?

As if in answer, a vision of himself writing the first paragraph of this post appears before him. He reads his overblown prose and is disheartened by its forced archness, the way it wishes to be taken seriously but reeks of preemptive, defensive irony—tidy bulwarks against the possibility of suck—and remembers the old chestnut:

Those who can do, do. Those who can't, write dissertations about those who can.

Monday, 18 December 2006

The emails I've received this week about where I stand vis-à-vis my program and the job market forced me to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about blogging under your own name:

You're not nearly so important as you think you are.

The assumption that everyone knows everything about you is pure hubris. Some people know some little something, but those people can be counted on one hand. Most people only know you as someone who writes what they read when stranded hikers and basketball brawls bore them to the bottom of the world. They know naught of your hopes, dreams, or life-and-death struggles with cancer.

So it behooves you to repeat yourself every once in a while. Or write an "About Me" page which includes all this information. Thing is, preemptive pity parties strike most people as more than a little crass, so repetition it is:

I won't hit the market this year. Before I started this blog, I lost a year I should've been working to feeling like shit. You see, I spent about seven months barely able to stop puking long enough to sleep. I slept-walked whilst dehydrated through a quarter and a half before I went to the doctor and discovered I had cancer. But as I'd been taught to keep my pain to myself and not make excuses, I kept it to myself, didn't make excuses and continued to teach.

A sane person—by which I mean, a Jew without a Puritanical work ethic—would've taken a leave of absence. But I didn't. So in addition to the seven months I lost to feeling the effects of the tumor, I spent another six feeling the effects of its cure. I should've spent all of them working. (Not that I didn't work, mind you, I just didn't work well.)

So after losing that year and some-odd months, I'd reestablished my writing routine and was looking forward to finishing my dissertation ...

... when I got hit by a car. The next seven months, I struggled to continue my researches. I would've done better were it not for that nagging feeling of impending vomit. And now it is today.

So there you have it. I would be on the market this year were it not for a truly extraordinary string of bad luck. Now that I've fulfilled the repetitional imperative, I beg of you to come back. Repetition may be necessary, but it sure ain't pretty. If only there were some way I could guarantee you came back ...

Really? Someone needed Google to answer that? I find it difficult to imagine the motivating prompt:

Is the central character in a novel epitomizing the
compensatory masculinity of “a generation of men raised by women”
really all that masculine? Your answer should take the form of a “Yes”
or a “No.” Students choosing the latter must also identify the occupant
of Grant’s Tomb. Failure to do so correctly will result in my friends
and I reconsidering our position on compulsory sterilization.

Some searches resist identification by virtue of their excessive generality, like the one demanding Google produce a “good reading [of] ode on a grecian urn.” Do such searches betray the desperation of a beleaguered and waning faith in student intellection?

Over the course of the semester, your profound ignorance
of history, literature, culture and the fundaments of English grammar
convinced me that anything resembling an argument written in anything
approximating standard English is almost too much to ask. I would no
more entrust you with a sentence than a baby with a machete, but as an
oral exam would remind me that you exist outside the nightmare my
therapist recommended I consider the fifty minutes I spend with you
demons three times a week, I have no choice but to suggest someone else
write your paper for you. Straight plagiarism is preferred, since your
transparent paraphrases will only force me to spend ten seconds
resenting everyone who decided the world would be a better place if no
one strangled you.

Then there are the students who leach the fun from this contest by including the prompt in their search, e.g.

Friday, 15 December 2006

The 2006 History Carnival Happy Holidays Party started with a bang. Someone had circled the twenty-third on the dry erase board and scribbled "Scott's B-Day!" underneath it. Then David Parker informed me of how special I could have been. "Should held out for two more days."

I slammed down my spoon and asked him whether he wanted to take it outside. He's lucky Donny and the warehouse crew held me back. Had they held out for two more minutes, I could have killed him. Instead, I brushed the cake from my lap and walked away. I spied Nathanael from accounts receivable in the corner chatting up one of the temps about the origins of French nationalism.

They looked at me funny and muttered something about "exports" and "pinochle" while I went to get Donny to hold me back again. I couldn't find him, though, so I let the matter drop and mingled.

In the copy room, I ran into Mr. Salesperson-of-the-Year himself, Tim Abbott, who was trying to convince H.R. people to trade short snorters with him. He may even have been successful. Last I saw, he was in his cubicle carefully explaining to the new girl from Duluth how snort shorters, he mean shot snooters, check, that's snot shooters—last I saw, he'd obviously convinced someone to play along.

I thought Gavin from marketing might have gotten in on Tim's fun, what with all the Bing-Bong-this and Bing-Bong-that, but Jenny from reception told me it was all about his great-grandfather. I don't know. I think he was tipping back the applejack with Lars Smith and the creepy guy stalking the planters. (Someone should tell that fellow about the miracle of modern chemistry. The styrofoam bits in the "dirt" seemed to confuse him.)

On my way to the conference room, I overhead Natalie Bennett and some women I didn't recognize discussing something in the hall. One of them asked in fawning disbelief: "Really? A new hymnographer?"

"Surprise, surprise," I said, "Oprah and her minions 'discovered' a genius new poetess no one cares about."

I waited for them to laugh, but they just stared at me like I hadn't made quotation marks in the air. (Remember that joke about feminists not having a sense of humor? It's no joke. You really do need a penis. If only there were some book I could read to understand how feminazis think. What? Thanks! Wait, I said feminazi. This one won't do me any good.)

Over in the conference room, Zendo tried to convince me that the South lost the Civil War for tactical reasons. As if. Zendo (or, as I like to call him, "The Zen Meister") might have been more convincing if I hadn't seen the bong-snorters in there with him and Richard Baker earlier. Not that I dislike Richard. The man can teach anything to anyone like snap. The other day I learned everything worth knowing about Ancient Egypt in ten minutes. Who needs college?

Certainly not me. Not that you could convince Abu Sahajj of that. I bumped into Mr. I-didn't-enter-a-Substance-Abuse- Program-a-week-into-my-First-Semester in the corner prattling on about "American imperalism."

"Bill thinks we'll never pay the national debt. Like American Express would ever let that happen."

Sahajj walked away shaking his head. See what kind of stupid college turns people?

Kristen from the Seattle office evidently didn't appreciate the cheap shot at American Express. (Wonder what she did after high school.) Started saying something about "fugitive slaves." I decided to show her up too:

After a quick pit stop, I found my way into the break room, where Alvaro Fernandez was chatting up the "Brain and Workplace Productivity Enhancer Expert" the suits flew in about, about, about—I'm not sure what they were talking about, but it must've been pretty dry.

"No one remembers Illyria," I overheard Fernandez say. The Mind Guru responded something to the effect of "I love irony."

Betty from accounts payable rolled her eyes back and almost out her head: "Don't they know better than to talk shop at the Christmas Party?"

"Holiday Party."

"What? Shut up. Do you even work here anymore?"

Three rejections and two flagons of "holiday cheer" later, I let the people from archives have it with an overloud "I've had it up to here with your arbitrary Deweys and decimals!" (Hallmark sells a "Sorry I Exploded at You for Doing Your Job Conscientiously" card, right? Does it come with a picture of a kitten in it or am I going to have to bust out the glue stick?)

Jonathanagreed with me, but I didn't care to return the favor. I don't think the path from poetic justice to historical causality is quite as long as he seems to.

"It can be very short indeed," I half-remember shouting, "Especially when you're so 'clever'!"

I'm not sure what happened next, and all anyone'll tell me is that the party concluded, quote, "most gratifyingly."

Many of you will be attending the MLA in Philadelphia in a few
weeks, and we here at The Internet would love to meet as many of you as
we can. “My” panel on academic blogging is Saturday at 8:30 a.m. in room 308 of the Philadelphia Marriott—a terrible time, yes, but perfect for a brunch afterwards so long as too many people don’t attend. Thing is, I’ve heard word that too many people will
in fact attend, which means we ought to think about alternative
arrangements. Some of us will be heading to D.C. Saturday night for UnfoggeDCon. Others have plans for early Friday evening, but maybe a later engagement could be arranged? (After all, it is Friday night.)

Then there’s Thursday night. Many of you will already be around for
Amardeep, Michael, Rita Felski and Jeffrey Williams’ panel on “Literary Studies in the Public Sphere“ (scroll down), which begins promptly at 12:00 p.m. in the Philadelphia Marriott’s Liberty Ballroom Salon C.

I’m merely throwing out ideas here. Anyone who’s interested
(participants included) in attending some sort of blog-specific
extra-curricular activity send me an email at scotterickaufman (at)
gmail (dot) com. Give us a general idea of your schedule and we’ll try
to accommodate as many people as is mathematically possible.

Wednesday, 13 December 2006

I confess: I often read posts in Google Reader without clicking through to read the comments. Sometimes I don't even have time to read the posts and end a week with an imposing backlog. In December's haul, I encountered this Charlotte Street post. It contained a link to the (unread) comments to this earlier one, in which the world-renowned Deborah asks:

Is this a post about Scott Eric Kaufman and The Valve?

'Cause boy, it sure fits like it.

Mark responds with typical grace, but the comment still grates on my nerves. The post concerned imposture and academic charlatanry—a subject previously discussed at the now-defunct CPROBES—and the remarkable Deborah thinks me a prime example of both. Why? Because I've neither read nor thought seriously about Continental philosophy, generally, or Zizek, in particular.

I'm positive the illustrious Deborah intended to be ironic there. No one with her sterling reputation would intentionally respond to a post about judging someone by reputation instead of a knowledge of their work by judging me on the basis of my reputation and not a knowledge of my work, right?

Tuesday, 12 December 2006

The more I talk to (current and former) graduate students outside my
department, the more I realize how variable the graduate school
experience can be. Like yours, my graduate experience is singular,
determined by the temperament of my advisor and committee. The more I
listen, the more I hear of expectations utterly foreign to my
experience. For example, is it common for advisors to expect weekly
updates about what one has read and written? I could easily produce
documentation of the sort. To wit:

As you can see, I have no problem producing such an accounting—but
as the attendant links indicate, anyone who wants such information need
only consult my blog. I may not diarize it in neat vignettes, but
anyone who wishes to can infer the arc of my research from what I
publish online. They may not know exactly why I’m reading or thinking
through or writing about what I’m reading, thinking through or writing
about, but it is obvious that I’m not wasting my days futzing around and drinking my nights away, right?

If my committee wants tabs on me, I provide prose enough to keep them
close. But maybe I should be more proactive? Maybe I should document
and email every curve the archive hurls, play Elias Sports to my own dissertation—but (he says, blithely shifting metaphors)
I fear a ticker scrolling SEKCH3 -0.07/-0.39% or somesuch every
Saturday morning would compel my committee to raise arms against me.

So what, in your experience, do advisors and committees expect of
graduate students? I know such things are variable in the extreme, so
if you could recount—anonymously if necessary—what was expected of you
or what you expect of your graduate students in this regard, I would
appreciate it. After all, how can I talk about professionalization generally if I’m only able to speak to my own?